Windows Vista Down; On to Windows 7?

The prolonged, three-month launch of Windows Vista is finally history. Microsoft
delivered Vista to business users on Nov. 30 and to the rest of the world on
Jan. 29. So now it's on to the "Fiji" and "Vienna" releases
about which we've been hearing for months, right?

Wrong.

Future versions of Windows are going to bear little resemblance to what we've
heard so far officially -- and unofficially -- from Microsoft and the individuals
who love to leak tidbits about the company. In fact, according to one of my
reliable tipsters, the new and reorganized Windows organization, led by Senior
Vice President Steven Sinofsky, is trying to wean folks completely off the Windows
code names they have been using for the next couple of releases of Windows.

Welcome to the brave new world of "Windows 7" (a boringly named complement
to "Office 14," the successor to Office 2007).

(This column, by the way, is purely speculative, a cobbling together of source
information and my own hunches. Microsoft won't talk about Windows futures right
now, in part because the company doesn't want to take the focus off Vista, and
also because the Windows organization is still trying to sort itself out. Company
officials aren't even venturing to talk about when Vista Service Pack 1 will
hit.)

Whatever Windows 7 ends up looking like, there's one thing I'm counting on
-- it's not going to be developed, tested or marketed anything like its recent
Windows predecessors. It's likely to be less ambitious in its goals, feature
set and its development, be more modular in its design and, possibly, more role-based
in its delivery. In general, watch for more incremental Windows releases, supplemented
by more feature pack/service pack updates. This will be coupled with more new
components released as services.

Given that Sinofsky, head of Windows and Windows Live engineering, most recently
lorded over the development of Microsoft Office, it seems natural to look for
clues about Windows in not only the Windows history archives, but maybe especially
in the Office annals.

Here's what we know about Vista: It's too big, still hampered by internal code
dependencies and was concocted by way too many cooks. Because of this, the product
kept slipping and shedding features, missed the holiday buying season and was
released to market before many Microsoft partners (and Microsoft product teams)
had delivered Vista-compatible drivers and applications.

Here's what we know about Office: New versions ship every two years, like clockwork.
If the development process is messy and features/functionality are cut, no one
seems to know or care. Even when it includes controversial new features -- like
Office 2007's ribbon user interface and the new XML file format that require
a downloadable patch in order for users of older versions to read Office 2007
Open-XML-formatted documents. Nevertheless, Office still comes out smelling
like a rose.

What can Microsoft do to make Windows more like Office?

Don't bite off more than you can chew. Don't over-promise.

Trim (or, more accurately, ax) the size of the team developing the product.

Stop talking about unreleased products. Don't share publicly a list of
promised features/functionality before the product is totally locked down.
Punish transgressors both inside and outside the company.

Cease sharing any information about delivery milestones or dates. Never
talking about ship targets means never having to say you're sorry.

Microsoft is currently facing some of the same problems with Vista it has been
experiencing with Office for a couple of years now. The biggest competitor to
Vista isn't Mac OS X or Linux -- it's Windows XP. Consequently, the Windows
team increasingly finds itself in the same straits as the Office folks -- namely,
it needs to convince users who don't really need a brand new release of Windows
that they do. Let's see what Sinofsky & Co. come up with, beyond making
new, desirable features available only to customers who sign multi-year volume-
licensing contracts.

More Information

Mary Jo Foley is editor of the ZDNet "All About Microsoft" blog and has been covering Microsoft for about two decades. She's the author of "Microsoft 2.0" (John Wiley & Sons, 2008), which examines what's next for Microsoft in the post-Gates era.